


the past is a foreign country (diplomacy sometimes breaks down)

by Morbane



Category: The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Far Future, Gen, The Orbs, Time Travel, Time Travel Theories, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 21:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14028642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: Returning with the Orbs was never the best-case scenario - they were placed in the past for a reason.On the other hand, it also wasn't the worst.(A theory of how the Orb plot looked from the perspective of Karina's people.)





	the past is a foreign country (diplomacy sometimes breaks down)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



Karina stepped through the portal.

Before her eyes cleared, the smoothness of the stonewood floor told her that she had landed true. Stonewood was used throughout the Time Lab, and she had practised microtravel, at the negligible energy cost of a few seconds' displacement, over and over, here. Her left foot brushed against a pile of cloth - her discarded clothing. It was still warm.

With care, she directed the Orbs to rest on the floor, and then dressed. She arranged her insignia sashes precisely. Even though only her own colleagues waited beyond the chamber’s door – even though the oldest motto of the Time Lab was ‘All the Time in the World’ – by stepping through the door, she would set in motion a chain of events as important to her as thwarting John Bly had been, and she would have few chances to pause and reflect.

Even though she was not carrying them, the Orbs were a heavy burden - and in other ways, they were light. Far too light. They had not been meant to be recovered to her timeline in this state.

The Orbs had been placed in 1893 to accumulate a specialised potential through time. Centuries should have increased their stored power before Karina or her colleagues laid hands on them again.

Bly had stolen the true power of the Orbs from the people of the fifty-sixth century as blatantly as he had stolen them from the people of the nineteenth century.

The second task of the Time Lab had been to place the Orbs in the past. The third task of the Time Lab in this endeavor had been to thwart Bly and retrieve the Orbs. The fourth task was now to explain the implications of the Orb retrieval to Karina’s superiors and political leaders, as clearly as possible, as positively as possible, to try to spin hope out of defeat.

The fifth task was very similar to the first.

* * *

When the Time Lab had been authorized to place three Orbs in the past, eight history divisions had been placed under Karina’s direction.

In Karina’s universe’s past, there had been no nineteenth-century Orbs. To place the Orbs in the past created a new branch of the multiverse – one that was still tied to Karina's own, and largely stabilized against further branching, through the sub’versal links created and maintained by the Orbs.

Although the precise mechanism was a matter of debate, it was common knowledge that universes frequently diverged. New parallel universes were created all the time. But it was Time Lab philosophy - and policy - that in this instance, when Karina's Time Lab had created a parallel universe on purpose out of their past, they had a moral responsibility to monitor it in the case that a significantly worse existence was created for humanity. 

And if so…

Karina doubted that all of her society's leaders had believed this could happen - after all, the Orbs had been designed to resist malignant interference. The mechanisms weren’t Karina’s area of expertise, but she had attended several presentations. She had been half disturbed, half reassured when a speaker had concluded his talk about ways in which the Orbs responded to benevolent intent by looking around the audience-sphere, and saying, “In essence, the Orbs are operated by _hope_ ,” and she had seen nods of agreement and understanding from colleagues she respected.

But appropriate care required mechanisms for cure, as well as prevention.

The history divisions’ work had begun before the Orbs’ placement, and reached a fever pitch immediately after. After training themselves to understand the context of the period, they had scoured the available records from the moment of the Orbs' placement to the last moment that the Orbs’ new universe had been tied to Karina’s. 

The first blow had been that the Orbs never even reached the fifty-sixth century in their own timeline. The blows became a battering.

When the history divisions produced a preliminary report of John Bly's tyranny, fourteen of Karina's twenty Stateheads voted that the hell on earth he had created had passed the moral event threshold, and should be averted. 

Six wavered.

In the fifteen-hundred-year history of the Time Lab, only four interventions had been approved, and two of those had occurred outside the solar system for the specific purpose of minimizing impact to _human_ history. Time interference was not undertaken lightly – here it was a mark of the immense value and – well, hope – the Orbs represented. To some, even Bly's reign was acceptable collateral.

The second report was produced a week later, and a more refined picture had now emerged of their sister-world's history: all twenty Stateheads then accepted the need to intervene. The fact that had tipped the balance was that Bly's end had been achieved with the unambiguous destruction of one of the two Orbs he had captured intact. 

One Orb had arrived damaged in the mid-nineteenth century, and had not survived to a further century. John Bly had succeeded in taking two Orbs to his own time. After his demise, one remained – but it remained under a time-lock that he had set up to prevent interference until the year 4981.

Immediately after the time lock expired – by mere minutes, as far as Karina's teams could determine – the Orb-based link between Bly's verse and Karina's was lost. The end of the Orb's existence in Bly's universe could mean one of two things: that Karina's universe would successfully retrieve it, perhaps in the coming weeks, or that it had been destroyed or stolen by an unknown agent. In the best-case scenario, one Orb would be recovered to Karina's timeline with 2500 years of its uniquely stored power. In the worst... Karina's Time Lab would be responsible for another world's dystopia, and would have nothing to show for it.

Just as the number of parallel universes were ever-increasing, and literally uncountable, sustaining a link with a specific other universe was a matter of immense difficulty. The Orbs anchored the link. With the destruction of the Orbs, the link was lost, and Bly’s timeline became a mote of dust for which a seeker must search all Creation.

Karina had been authorized to retrieve the unpowered Orbs rather than risk their loss.

* * *

In preparing to appear in 1894, Karina had commanded the full processing power of the Time Lab's entanglement engine to play out thousands of intervention scenarios. 

When she had told Brisco, _No jewelry_ , it had been accurate, but only in the strictest sense. Only an augment module allowed her to speak and understand the ancient languages spoken in 1894 San Francisco, and she had used the module to load up 3891 divergence scenarios – her assistants had helped her to choose them according to theme as well as likelihood. (It had taken a pleasing twenty minutes before the interaction with Brisco had diverged from all of them – Karina's second in command had more optimistically estimated fifty minutes, which Karina had tactfully not contradicted – and after that she had simply done her best.)

They had two Orbs.

They had lost the hope of using the Orbs as they had been first designed.

In another five hundred years, as best they could tell, something would happen. Something obscure, something ominous; something for which ‘something’ was almost the most precise description that could be found. The future vanished to the fifty-sixth century’s probes, as if past a certain point, it ceased to exist.

At first, Karina's Time Lab predecessors had attributed to their reports a sort of natural barrier to future sight - but as real time had proceeded and the barrier had not shifted, their reports had darkened in tone. 

The current theory was that in the year 6012 – give or take a decade, or even a century – a “collapse event” would wipe out a vast number of parallel universes. Including Karina's. Perhaps the universe had reached its limit; perhaps another, hostile parallel universe would destroy Karina’s; what the Time Lab knew was that it didn’t know.

Following a vast and ambitious theory, the Orbs had been designed to avert this collapse. But instead of three orbs, with over ten thousand years of power combined, they would have a handful of years of power allotted between two.

And one last task - the monitoring of Brisco's timeline, and the Orb remnants still scattered there, to ensure that another tyranny did not ensue in a universe that was yet, by rights, under their aegis.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear DesertScribe, thanks for some really interesting prompts! This is my first work for the fandom and your prompts were a key motivation to attempt it.
> 
> I realise belatedly that this came out darker and angstier than really suits Brisco's canon tone. Please feel free to imagine that Karina's people come up with an effective solution to their problem soon after the end of the story - that's what I'm doing.
> 
> Thanks to 20thcenturyvole, SO much, for sentence-level checking at incredibly short notice and to several friends for cheerleading.


End file.
